Oscars 2026 and Dune Part 3: Where to now for Timothee Chalamet after latest loss?

Hours after David Ellison closed his acquisition of Paramount Studios in August, one of the first deals he signed was with Timothee Chalamet and James Mangold.

The actor and filmmaker had just come off the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and will come together again in another film, this time about a former motocross racer still contending with a career-ending crash.

It was what the industry calls a hot “package”, a combination of in-demand talent that attracted competing bids from different studios.

Ellison wanted it as a splashy declaration that he was taking his expanded movie slate seriously, and seven months ago, getting into the Chalamet business made that statement.

Today, one day after Chalamet lost out on the best actor Oscar to Michael B. Jordan, it’s a different story.

Was the former presumed Oscar frontrunner and newfound enemy of ballerinas and opera divas everywhere now on the nose? Has the 18 months he spent cosplaying Marty Mauser done irreparable damage to his career?

Firstly, Jordan didn’t just win because Chalamet lost. Jordan won in his own right for two performances, as twins Smoke and Stack, in Sinners, an incredibly well-made and beloved film that had a late-in-the-season surge of momentum.

It was a year of riches and in the best actor category, any one of those nominees, also including Wagner Moura, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ethan Hawke, could’ve deservedly won.

Chalamet definitely had the early momentum, from the moment Marty Supreme premiered at the New York Film Festival in October in a secret screening. The reports out of that was that it was a career defining, full tilt performance that was going to see him win the Oscar that was denied to him the previous season.

When he lost to Adrien Brody this time last year, there were plenty of people who thought he should’ve won, and were even looking for a reason to give him another shot. Marty Supreme was meant to be that reason.

But the Oscars are notorious for not awarding young men in the best actor category, and Brody remains the only thesp in the Academy Awards’ 98-year history to have won while under the age of 30 (for The Pianist in 2003).

Not only is Chalamet young — he turned 30 in December — but he looks young, much younger than Brody did at 29. He has a youthful energy, some would say swagger, and for many, he’ll always be that kid from Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird and Little Women.

It’s why he collaborated with the American Cinematheque on that career retrospective for which he enlisted the likes of Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Ben Affleck and Elle Fanning to host Q&As, to remind everyone that despite his age, he already has a weighty filmography.

He was a child actor in the likes of Interstellar and Homeland but it was Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s queer coming-of-age love story adapted from Andre Aciman’s novel, which put Chalamet on everyone’s radars.

At only 21 years of age, Chalamet’s sensitive and commanding performance as Elio was mighty impressive. There was an emotional maturity and natural instinct he displayed in his craft, that instantly made him someone to watch.

The challenge Chalamet faced with Marty Supreme was that he had to run two simultaneous campaigns that ultimately appealed to two very different demographics.

The first is the Marty Supreme marketing campaign whose purpose is to sell tickets and get bums in seats. In this, Chalamet was flawless.

The line between him and his fictional character blurred as he adopted a version of Marty Mauser’s persona of greatness at all costs. The faux marketing zoom meeting, the stunt at the top of The Sphere in Las Vegas, the orange-headed men following him around, the video with UK rapper EsDeeKid and the rest all created a sense of excitement around Marty Supreme.

Chalamet was everywhere, and he enlisted huge names such as Tom Brady and Kid Cudi in his service, all wearing the viral Marty Supreme tracksuit, and it made you want to see his film.

It ended up being its studio, indie outfit A24’s highest grossing release with a current box office of $US179 million. It only just opened in Japan and China — Chalamet did the promo rounds in Asia the week before the Oscars — so expect that number to go up.

The movie’s tagline was “dream big” and Chalamet stayed in character to sell it, especially to a younger audience for whom cinemagoing is not a baked-in habit.

But it was too good, and a video of an interview he gave late last year went viral, one in which he claimed, “This is probably my best performance, and it’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances.

“It’s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I’m bring to these things, I don’t want people to take for granted. I don’t want to take for granted. This is really some top-level sh-t.”

OK, Chalamet is not wrong because if you look at his work over that period, it really is that good — Beautiful Boy, The King, The French Dispatch, Dune Part 1 and 2, Bones and All, Wonka, along with his aforementioned signature roles. Even when the film is iffy, he’ not.

He already has four Oscar nominations, including three for acting.

While he was clearly hamming it up in the context of a marketing campaign full of extreme moments, it also had a whiff of something resembling truth.

It was a little too reminiscent of Chalamet’s acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in which he said, in earnest, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness, I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats”.

You have to wonder if even that moment in February 2025, coming two months after Chalamet wrapped principal photography on Marty Supreme, and around the same time as additional filming, wasn’t still in his character’s frame-of-mind.

He was also gearing up to play Paul Atreides again in the third Dune film, and that character is a young man who’s been told he’s the saviour in an age-old prophecy and comes to embrace that mantle with a little too much enthusiasm.

Spending all that time embodying those sorts of characters could mess with your head, especially if you already live in a celebrity bubble where your minders shield you from the real world.

It’s also too brash for Academy voters and the industry elite, and a late pivot to a more modest tone for the Oscar campaigning – fewer all-orange ensembles - wasn’t entirely convincing when those two pushes bled from one into the other. The hangover was too strong.

When Chalamet made those comments about ballet and opera being artforms “no one cares”, they absolutely blew up, not because all those people piling on online cared deeply about live performance, you suspect half the haters haven’t even been to the opera or ballet in the past 10 years.

But because it was a chance to “get” Chalamet on something, as if this was the encapsulation of what they wanted to believe about him, as a cocky young upstart who cavorts with a Kardashian/Jenner, plays basketball and video games, doesn’t understand the legacy of art, and, most importantly, wasn’t humble.

It’s unlikely it “cost” him that Oscar win. The controversy broke through in the final hours of the voting period and a lot of those 11,000 Academy members, especially the older ones of which there are many, aren’t chronically online.

But it was effective in villainising Chalamet because it focused the growing unease about him in one clearly definable act — “Look, look at what a brat he is, slagging off other hard-working artists who aren’t as lucky or privileged as him”.

What the world needs now from Chalamet is to see less of him. He’s been so ubiquitous since Wonka came out over two years ago, embarking on one press tour after another. That work ethic is actually what makes him successful, that he’s willing to go out there and really sell his movies, often in unusual ways.

But after that balls-to-the-wall Marty Supreme marketing campaign, the world has decided they’ve had enough for now.

It’s not to be. This morning, Chalamet’s Instagram account, along with that of Warner Bros’s and Dune’s revealed the first character posters from Dune Part 3 with the promise of the first teaser trailer to drop tomorrow.

The film isn’t out until December 17 but it’s not unheard of for big blockbusters to kick off their promos nine months out. Also likely, these dates (and ad space) were booked in weeks ago, when the prevailing wisdom was that Chalamet was going to win that Oscar and Dune would be able to exploit that halo effect.

It probably didn’t think they would now have to navigate an environment where Chalamet’s presence could be a liability.

The next 12 to 24 months will be crucial, as is some form of image rehabilitation that can appease different demographics.

But he is a talented actor, and if he can show patience and contrition, whether it’s fair or not to impose, he will get his Oscar one day. He’s too good to be denied.